Friday, August 03, 2012

OMG! The free market works!

An unintentionally hilarious piece recently appeared in the Pravda of contemporary progressive liberalism, The New York Times.

This lachrymose report laments the fact that major public school districts around the country are losing customers — oops! students — and the result is layoffs. Of teacher union members, no less! Quelle horreur!

Between 2005 and 2010, Broward County (FL), Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus (OH), Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Bernardino, and Tucson have all lost students, some massively.

The article tells some tragic tales. LA let go of 8,500 teachers in the face of an enrollment drop of 56,000 students. Mesa Unified District lost 7,155 students and had to close four middle schools and lay off librarians — the ultimate evil.

The cutbacks are threatening offerings in art, foreign languages, and music.

But to what do the authors of this mournful article attribute this decline? They mention declining birthrates, unemployed parents moving elsewhere to find work, and illegal immigration crackdowns. But they also mention — tentatively and skeptically — the movement of students from regular district schools (essentially run by the teacher unions) to charter schools (run more or less autonomously, i.e., not under the unions’ thumb).

In Columbus, enrollment in charter schools rose by 9,000 students while enrollment in the public school district dropped by 6,150. One honest parent explained, “The classes were too big, the kids were unruly and didn’t pay attention to the teachers.” So she sent her dyslexic daughter to a nearby charter school, where — GASP! — “one of the teachers stayed after school every Friday to help her.”

In an institution where pleasing the customer is actually important, it’s no surprise that her daughter received the help she needed.

Nationwide, while the number of kids in regular public schools dropped by 5%, the number in charter schools rose by 60%.

Naturally, the public school system special interest groups — greedy unions, self-righteous teachers, callous administrators, and so on — are hysterical. For example, one Jeffrey Mirel, an “education historian” at the University of Michigan, bleated that public schools are in danger of becoming “the schools nobody wants.”

Wrong! Public schools have been for some timethe schools that nobody wants. Before the 1960s, teachers unions either didn't exist or — where they did — didn't exert the control they assumed in the 1970s. Teachers unions run schools for the benefit of their members only. So the problems started accelerating.But what’s happening right now is that some few lucky kids are being given the choice to get out — and they’re taking it.

Political conversation in the media is full of chatter about how to cut spending and debt, but it reminds us of the comment attributed to Mark Twain: "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it." There's a lot of talk about how to cut back on entitlements, but why doesn't somebody suggest cutting the extravagant federal dollars spent on education, which is not even an entitlement?

The billions spent on education have not achieved any of their designated goals, which were to raise the test scores and to close the gap between kids from upper-income and lower-income families. The handouts, however, produced a lot of cheating by teachers and administrators trying to hide their failure to achieve designated goals.

We hear about increasing the role of the states in other areas such as Medicaid. But the most important area where the states should have primary responsibility is education.

The most powerful union of government employees is the National Education Association, which held this year's annual national convention, as usual, over the Fourth of July weekend, attracting 9,000 delegates. To no one's surprise, it resembled a re-election campaign rally for Barack Obama, with the pressure on delegates to identify themselves as EFO, Educators for Obama.

Many delegates wore Obama campaign buttons and T-shirts and sported banners with messages such as "You are our knight in shining armor." The official NEA newspaper, called RA Today and published every day during the week-long convention, featured a very political full-page endorsement of Obama headlined "Do your part and pledge to be an educator for Obama today!"

In preparation for the convention, NEA leaders had been urging their members to hold house parties to teach their friends why Obama deserves their votes. House parties were one of the successful tactics Obama used to win his election in 2008.

The NEA convention passed its usual scores of anti-parent, anti-school-choice, pro-feminist, pro-homosexual resolutions that morph into the NEA's Legislative Program. This authorizes the highly paid NEA staff to lobby Congress, state legislatures, education departments and school boards to adopt NEA policies.

One significant new resolution adopted this year reads: "The Association also believes that members have the right to have payroll deduction of both Association membership dues and voluntary political contributions." That should make it clear that the way to cut the NEA's political power is for state legislatures to pass paycheck protection laws that prohibit the racket of state governments deducting political contributions out of the paychecks of teachers and turning the money over to the NEA bosses to elect Democrats.

We can get a look at NEA's political clout by reading a memorandum distributed to the delegates by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. It reveals the amount of money available in the NEA Ballot Measures/Legislative Crises Fund in the current year, beginning with $1,563,775 and projecting $26,939,129 by the end of the year.

Already this year, the NEA powers-that-be have approved $270,000 to four state affiliates to use in ballot measure campaigns, $7,163,492 in assistance to 17 state affiliates for legislative battles, and $2,500,000 for lobby-campaign efforts related to the congressional reauthorization of federal education appropriations.

Another memo Van Roekel distributed to delegates gave detailed information about the NEA Media Campaign Fund for the 2011-2012 fiscal year. These two funds are supported by a special dues assessment on every NEA member.

The NEA's official Legislative Program includes many items that implement radical liberal ideology but have nothing to do with educating students. This column isn't long enough to list the 31 pages of fine print detailing the NEA's legislative demands, so I'll just mention a few to give you the flavor.

To nobody's surprise, the NEA supports "national health care that will mandate universal coverage." The NEA supports a long list of United Nations treaties, all of which would limit U.S. sovereignty and meddle in our domestic laws and customs.

The NEA supports adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would mandate "equality of rights ... on account of sex." To reinforce that goal, the NEA supports passage of a federal statute to assure "sexual orientation" rights.

The NEA supports "confirmation of Supreme Court Justices and federal judges who support civil rights." According to the NEA, "civil rights" includes both "reproductive freedom" and "prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and expression."

Rising numbers of students from crisis-hit European countries are flocking to British universities to flee economic chaos at home, according to research.

Demand for courses abroad has soared by more than 150 per cent among students from Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal, figures suggest.

Britain is the most popular destination for young people educated in southern European countries which have been hardest hit by the sovereign-debt crisis dogging the eurozone.

The rise will drive concerns that British students may face added competition in the race for degree courses at top universities this summer.

Undergraduates from other European Union countries are eligible for the same Government-backed loans as British students and count towards strict limits on the numbers of places available at each institution.

The disclosure is revealed in a report by Study Portals, an EU-funded website set up to help young people apply to university courses elsewhere in the continent.

According to figures, the number of enquiries made through the website from Greek, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese students has soared by 80,000 in 2012 compared with a year earlier.

Demand to study outside their own country is up by more than 180 per cent among Italian students, 162 per cent from Greeks, 157 per cent from Spaniards and 140 per cent from Portuguese students.

The study said the figures reflected the link “between students’ economic perspectives at home and their ambition to study – and ultimately work – in better performing economies”.

It emerged that the four countries have higher youth unemployment rates than almost anywhere else in Europe, with the proportion of jobless young people ranging from more than a third in Portugal to 52 per cent in Greece.

According to researchers, Britain is the most popular destination among these students.

British universities accounted for 26 per cent of total enquiries from the four countries, it was revealed. This compared with a fifth of applications being made to Dutch universities and less than one-in-10 enquiries made to German and Swedish institutions.

The increase recorded in the study comes despite evidence that the total number of applications made to Britain from across the EU has dropped this year.

Last month, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) said that total demand was down by 13 per cent – 6,132 – this year compared with 2011, although the data failed to provide a country-by-country breakdown. This suggests that southern European countries may be bucking the trend.

It coincides with the introduction of higher tuition fees in September, with students paying up to £9,000 a year – almost three times maximum in 2011.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Teachers Unions Go to Bat for Sexual Predators

The system to review misconduct is rigged so even abusive teachers can stay on the job

By resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary "Waiting for 'Superman'" (2010) and a feature film, "Won't Back Down," to be released later this year. But perhaps most damaging to the unions' credibility is their position on sexual misconduct involving teachers and students in New York schools, which is even causing union members to begin to lose faith.

In the last five years in New York City, 97 tenured teachers or school employees have been charged by the Department of Education with sexual misconduct. Among the charges substantiated by the city's special commissioner of investigation—that is, found to have sufficient merit that an arbitrator's full examination was justified—in the 2011-12 school year:

* An assistant principal at a Brooklyn high school made explicit sexual remarks to three different girls, including asking one of them if she would perform oral sex on him.

* A teacher in Queens had a sexual relationship with a 13-year old girl and sent her inappropriate messages through email and Facebook.

If this kind of behavior were happening in any adult workplace in America, there would be zero tolerance. Yet our public school children are defenseless.

Here's why. Under current New York law, an accusation is first vetted by an independent investigator. (In New York City, that's the special commissioner of investigation; elsewhere in the state, it can be an independent law firm or the local school superintendent.) Then the case goes before an employment arbitrator. The local teachers union and school district together choose the arbitrators, who in turn are paid up to $1,400 per day. And therein lies the problem.

For many arbitrators, their livelihood depends on pleasing the unions (whether the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, or other local unions). And the unions—believing that they are helping the cause of teachers by being weak on sexual predators—prefer suspensions and fines, and not dismissal, for teachers charged with inappropriate sexual conduct. The effects of this policy are mounting.

One example: An arbitrator in 2007 found that teacher Alexis Grullon had victimized young girls with repeated hugging, "incidental though not accidental contact with one student's breast" and "sexually suggestive remarks." The teacher had denied all these charges. In the end the arbitrator found him "unrepentant," yet punished him with only a six-month suspension.

Another example from 2007: Teacher William Scharbach was found to have inappropriately touched and held young boys. "Respondent's actions at best give the appearance of impropriety and at worst suggest pedophilia," wrote the arbitrator—before giving the teacher only a reprimand. The teacher didn't deny the touching but denied that it was inappropriate.

Then there was teacher Steven Ostrin, who in 2010 was found to have asked a young girl to give him a striptease, harassed students by text, and engaged in sexual banter. The arbitrator in his case concluded that since the teacher hadn't actually solicited sex from students, the charges—all of which the teacher denied—warranted only a suspension.

Michael Loeb, a middle school teacher in the Bronx and UFT member, calls this a "horrible situation," telling me "if you keep these people in the classroom, you are demeaning our profession."

Parents I spoke with described their tremendous fear about what is happening in the classroom. Maria Elena Rivera says her 14-year-old daughter was stalked by one of her Brooklyn high school teachers (who resigned from his position before the Department of Education decided whether to send the case to arbitration). Today her daughter is in counseling, says Ms. Rivera, and doesn't trust anyone: "It so messed her up. I can't protect her."

Local media have begun to get the word out, yet the stories come and go with trifling consequences or accountability. New York City's schools chancellor and districts statewide must have the power to fire sexual predators—and the final say cannot be that of an arbitrator with incentives to lessen the punishment.

Fortunately, state Sen. Stephen Saland has proposed legislation in Albany to do just this, removing arbitrators' final say while still giving teachers due process and the opportunity to appeal terminations in court. But the buck would stop with those officials in charge of our schools and tasked with protecting our kids: the chancellor in New York City, and school districts elsewhere in the state.

Mr. Saland's initiative has little chance of success without union support—which is hardly assured. "I don't understand how they think this could be a gray area," says Natalie Harrington, who teaches English at New Day Academy in the Bronx. "I worry that if the union goes to bat [against] this, it makes it seem like they will do anything to keep anyone in the classroom."

Michael Loeb still supports his union but says it "treats teachers like interchangeable widgets"—defending all teachers no matter what they have done.

The union has reached a moment of truth. With responsible legislation on the table, the right course of action is obvious. At stake is the safety of kids, the reputation of the unions, and the standing of every good and responsible teacher throughout the state.

As a lawyer who used to bring civil-rights cases for a living, I am very disturbed by the Maryland State Board of Education’s proposed rule on race in school discipline...

This proposed rule violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution by pressuring schools to discipline students based on their race, rather than their individual conduct and the content of their character. That is at odds with court rulings like the federal appeals court ruling in People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997), which forbid both racial-balancing, and quotas, in school discipline.

Crimes and infractions are not evenly distributed among racial groups, as the Supreme Court noted in United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996). As that 8-to-1 Supreme Court ruling emphasized, there is no legal “presumption that people of all races commit all types of crimes” at the same rate, since such a presumption is “contradicted by” real world data. For example, “more than 90% of” convicted cocaine traffickers “were black” in 1994, while “93.4% of convicted LSD dealers were white.” Crime rates are higher in some ethnic groups than others.

But the Board of Education seems to have forgotten that reality in proposing a rule that would require school systems to discipline and suspend students in numbers roughly in proportion to their racial percentage of the student body, and require school systems that currently don’t do so to implement plans to eliminate any racially “disproportionate impact” over a three-year period. Thus, it is imposing quotas in all but name.

The Board has also seemingly overlooked a federal appeals court decision that ruled that schools cannot use racial proportionality rules for school discipline, since that violates the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. See People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (7th Cir. 1997). That court ruling also said that a school cannot use race to offset “disparate” or “disproportionate impact,” and that doing so is not a valid kind of affirmative action.

The proposed rule, COMAR 13A.08.01.21, is found on page 25 of the Report of the Maryland Board of Education: School Discipline and Academic Success: Related Parts of Maryland’s Education Reform. It reads as follows:

A. The Department shall develop a method to analyze local school system data to determine whether there is a disproportionate impact on minority students. B. The Department may use the discrepancy model to assess the impact of discipline on special education students. C. If the Department identifies a school’s discipline process as having a disproportionate impact on minority students or a discrepant impact on special education students, the school system shall prepare and present to the State Board a plan to reduce the impact within 1 year and eliminate it within 3 years. [boldface added]

Thus, the Board seeks to ban “disproportionate impact” – the term for something not motivated by racism that nevertheless unintentionally affects or weeds out more minorities than whites – in school discipline. But it has done so without the qualifications and limitations to that concept that apply in court. The Supreme Court has allowed minority employees to sue over such “disparate impact” in limited circumstances, but it has refused to allow minority students to sue over it. Its ruling in Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001), said that individuals could not sue under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for “disparate impact,” only intentional discrimination. Title VI is the federal law that covers racial discrimination in schools and other institutions that receive federal funds. (The Board’s proposed rule is not needed to prevent racism or deliberate discrimination, since there are already several laws banning discriminatory treatment of anyone based on their race, as opposed to disparate impact, that students victimized by racial discrimination can already sue under, like 42 U.S.C. 1981, and Title VI).

The fact that there are disparities in suspension rates between different ethnic groups does NOT prove racism by school officials, or discrimination. For example, in a ruling by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court said that it is “completely unrealistic” to argue that minorities should be represented in each field or activity “in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population.” (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 507 (1989)). In an earlier ruling, Justice O’Connor noted that it is “unrealistic to assume that unlawful discrimination is the sole cause of people failing to gravitate to jobs and employers in accord with the laws of chance.” (See Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust Co., 487 U.S. 977, 992 (1988).)

Many racial disparities in suspension rates are clearly NOT the product of discrimination. For example, Asians generally have lower infraction and suspension rates than whites and other ethnic groups, but no one would suggest that Asians are racially favored by school officials. Indeed, on occasion, school officials have discriminated against them: school officials in Philadelphia recently turned a blind eye to attacks on Asian students by African-American students in some of the city's schools, resulting in a federal investigation of the school system. In past generations when racism was more common, East Asians suffered extreme forms of discrimination by government officials, such as the California Supreme Court's turning Chinese immigrants into legal non-persons in the 1850s (it said they could not even testify in court, essentially creating an open season on their lives and property) and the federal government's internment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s.

The Constitution does not forbid “disproportionate impact” or “disparate impact.” The Supreme Court made that clear in Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 248 (1976), where it noted that it cannot be denied “that a whole range of tax, welfare, public service, regulatory, and licensing statutes” are “more burdensome to the poor and to the average black than to the more affluent white,” yet they are still constitutional.

The fact that a higher percentage of black students are suspended than whites in most schools is not, for the most part, the product of racism by school officials, but rather reflects greater infraction rates tied to lamentable factors like poverty and single-parent households. As a scholar at the Brookings Institution points out, “children who spend time in single-parent families are more likely to misbehave, get sick, drop out of high school and be unemployed.” As the National Center for Health Statistics notes, while most whites and Asians are born to two-parent families, most blacks and Hispanics are not. See National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 60, No.2: Births: Preliminary Data for 2010 (Nov. 17, 2011).

Since infraction rates are typically higher among such minority groups, their discipline and suspension rates are naturally higher as well, even if that is bureaucratically defined as “disproportionate impact.” This is a reflection of unpleasant realities, not school officials’ racism. Preventing such discipline will only cause more disorder and violence in the schools, especially in predominantly black schools, thus harming the very disadvantaged people the Board of Education seeks to help. Students are commonly victimized by members of their own race and peers of the same ethnicity. So watering down discipline for members of a racial group does not help that group. The fact that black students have been shortchanged by the larger society is not a reason to add insult to injury by depriving them of an orderly school environment and effective school discipline, or subjecting them to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Pressure to discipline minorities and whites in numbers proportional to their percentage of the student body may also lead to other forms of racial discrimination in discipline, such as needless suspensions of white and Asian students for technicalities that would result in nothing more than a warning for a black student.

Writing in the Summer 2006 edition of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, educator Edmund Janko explained how informal pressure from bureaucrats to suspend students in numbers proportional to their race (what Maryland’s Board now seeks) led him to engage in unfair racial discrimination against students, such as suspending white students for conduct that “would mean, in cases involving minority students,” merely “a rebuke from the dean and a notation on the record or a letter home”:

More than 25 years ago, when I was dean of boys at a high school in northern Queens, we received a letter from a federal agency pointing out that we had suspended black students far out of proportion to their numbers in our student population. Though it carried no explicit or even implicit threats, the letter was enough to set the alarm bells ringing in all the first-floor administrative offices. . .

There never was a smoking-gun memo . . . but somehow we knew we had to get our numbers “right”—that is, we needed to suspend fewer minorities or haul more white folks into the dean’s office for our ultimate punishment.What this meant in practice was an unarticulated modification of our disciplinary standards. For example, obscenities directed at a teacher would mean, in cases involving minority students, a rebuke from the dean and a notation on the record or a letter home rather than a suspension. For cases in which white students had committed infractions, it meant zero tolerance. Unofficially, we began to enforce dual systems of justice. Inevitably, where the numbers ruled, some kids would wind up punished more severely than others for the same offense.

I remember one case in particular. It was near the end of the day, and the early-session kids were heading toward the exits. . .The boy was a white kid, tall, with an unruly mop of blond hair. He was within 200 feet of the nearest exit and blessed freedom. But he couldn’t wait. The nicotine fit was on him, and he lit a cigarette barely two yards from me. I pounced, and within 20 minutes he was suspended—for endangering himself and others.

Janko’s article is aptly titled, It Still Leaves a Bad Taste, and is available here. His disturbing and unpleasant experience may be mild compared to what Maryland teachers and principals will experience if the proposed rule, COMAR 13A.08.01.21, is adopted in its current form. The federal agency that pressured Janko is the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) — where I used to work as a lawyer. Its disparate-impact regulations — which are of dubious validity in banning any kind of disparate impact at all, after the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision in Alexander v. Sandoval barring lawsuits against practices with a disparate impact — never purported to require school systems to eliminate all racially “disproportionate impact,” the way the Maryland Board of Education apparently seeks to do in school discipline through the proposed rule. Its rules never reached all statistical disparities.

Moreover, even if a school’s policies’ did have a meaningfully “disproportionate impact,” the school only needed to demonstrate to OCR a “substantial legitimate justification for its practice,” to keep using it. See Ga. State Conference of Branches of NAACP v. Georgia, 775 F.2d 1403, 1417 (11th Cir. 1985). No such common-sense exception for educational justifications is spelled out in the proposed rule. In short, Janko discriminated as he did because of bureaucratic dictates that were far less extreme than what may result from COMAR 13A.08.01.21. This is far more extreme. If the proposed rule is adopted in its current form, discrimination far worse than what Janko recounts will occur in Maryland’s schools.

Men can wear skirts at Oxford University as academic dress code is changed to 'meet needs of cross-dressing students'

For centuries, the sight of Oxford students in their distinctive academic gowns has been as familiar in the city as its dreaming spires.

But the ancient university has been forced to rewrite its traditional dress code – to avoid upsetting transgender students.

From next month, men will be allowed to wear skirts or stockings to exams while women can choose suits or white bow ties.

Under the old regulations, male students were required to wear a dark suit with dark socks, black shoes, a white bow tie, and a plain white shirt and collar beneath their black gowns when attending formal occasions such as examinations.

The dress code is strictly enforced by the university's authorities, which have the power to punish students deemed in breach of the rules. Punishments range from fines to rustication – the suspension of a student for a period of time – or expulsion, known as 'sending down'.

However, the university's council, headed by Vice-Chancellor Andrew Hamilton, has dropped any distinction between the sexes by deleting all references to men and women.

While students are still required to dress appropriately for formal occasions and exams, they no longer need to ensure their 'sub-fusc' – the clothes worn with full academic dress – is distinctive 'for each sex'.

The reforms were introduced following a campaign by the student union, which argued that transgender students, including transvestite or 'gender confused' men and women, could face punishment if they wore 'inappropriate' dress.

Jess Pumphrey, the union's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer executive officer, said the change would make a small number of students' exam experiences 'significantly less stressful by eliminating the need for trans students to cross-dress to avoid being... disciplined during their exam'.

She said there was 'an active transgender community' in Oxford, and every member she had spoken to 'had found sub-fusc, under the old regulations, to be stressful'. But one unnamed law student told the university newspaper Cherwell: 'This seems a bit unnecessary. It only applies to a tiny percentage of the student population and it seems unlikely that a trans student would really be confronted about what they are wearing.'

Former students also voiced their concerns about the change. Ann Widdecombe, who graduated from Lady Margaret Hall in 1972, said: 'If men want to prance around in skirts, that is entirely up to them.

'In my day, it would have been unthinkable – men were men and women were women, and we dressed accordingly. But I think the university is just saving itself from a silly row, and from that point of view I'm on their side. Why go courting a silly row when they don't need one?'

A spokesman for Oxford said: 'The regulations have been amended to remove any reference to gender, in response to concerns raised by Oxford University Student Union that regulations did not serve the interests of transgender students.'

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Racist Obama backs race-based school discipline policies

This would just about complete the destruction of American public school education

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools’ disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals’ behavior.

His July 26 executive order established a government panel to promote “a positive school climate that does not rely on methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.”

“African Americans lack equal access to highly effective teachers and principals, safe schools, and challenging college-preparatory classes, and they disproportionately experience school discipline,” said the order, titled “White House Initiative On Educational Excellence.”

Because of those causes, the report suggests, “over a third of African American students do not graduate from high school on time with a regular high school diploma, and only four percent of African American high school graduates interested in college are college-ready across a range of subjects.”

“What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for,” because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates, predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases.

“It is too bad that the president has chosen to set up a new bureaucracy with a focus on one particular racial group, to the exclusion of all others,” said Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.

“A disproportionate share of crimes are committed by African Americans, and they are disproportionately likely to misbehave in school… [because] more than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock… versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites,” he said in a statement to The Daily Caller. Although ” you won’t see it mentioned in the Executive Order… there is an obvious connection between these [marriage] numbers and how each group is doing educationally, economically, criminally,” he said.

Ethnic minority pupils' underachievement to be tackled by 'blind marking' in bid to remove British teachers' prejudice

A good idea for all

Teachers could 'blind mark' pupils' work in an attempt to raise exam scores of children from ethnic minorities. The controversial plans are designed to reduce inequalities between races.

Under the proposals, teachers would not know the identities of pupils when marking their work.

Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrat party and Deputy Prime Minister, is believed to be in support of the policy.

A study by education watchdog Ofsted in 1999 showed that children with African or Asian-sounding names were likely to be given lower marks of up to 12 per cent in some cases.

Statistics show that almost half of young black people and 31 per cent of young Asian [mainly Pakistani] people are unemployed.

It is believed Liberal Democrat communities minister, Andrew Stunell, along with Clegg, want to introduce the policies soon despite opposition from other ministers.

A senior Whitehall source told The Guardian: 'We waited a long time to get the integration strategy out the door, but we're now keen to get on with the job of implementing it.

'A lot of the projects supported by the integration strategy have slipped by under most people's radars, but Andrew is keen that we turn up the volume and speak out much more often and much louder on race issues.'

There are also proposals to ethnic monitor banks but it is feared that this could compromise people's privacy.

Only six per cent of black Caribbean and African people are self-employed or own their own business compared with 15 per cent of white people.

The plans are expected to be published in a report by Liberal Democrat Baroness Meral Hussein-Ece later this year.

Australia: Exclusive Brethren's Agnew School one of Queensland's best for academic performance

This should put to bed allegations that students at fundamentalist Christian schools suffer academically. The EB are VERY fundamentalist

IT is perhaps Queensland's least known and most misunderstood school. It is also one of the state's top consistent academic performers.

Clearly the Agnew School -- run by the Exclusive Brethren -- is doing something right, recording the state's highest OP1 to 15 percentage regardless of school size over the past five years.

It is one of a handful of small schools not included in top-performing OP charts each year because of potential statistical anomalies that can happen in tiny sample sizes.

But analysis of five years of OP data shows those top scores are consistent, recording 100 per cent of OP-eligible students achieving an OP1 to 15 in three out of the five years.

Principal Norm Sharples was quick to point out the school had only a small number of OP-eligible students each year, with between five and 22 recorded between 2007 and 2011.

He said small class sizes -- about 10 to 12 students per class -- a commitment to academic excellence by the school's board and strong parental support was behind consistent top student performances.

Contrary to popular belief, students at the school use "plenty" of technology, including video conferencing at its six campuses across southeast Queensland.

Mr Sharples said the school also encouraged students to enrol in tertiary studies.

"We try not to be distracted by outside elements we do sports internally. Our motto is learning to learn. We have schools in other states which we are often comparing results and we look at how we could be doing better," Mr Sharples said.

The school currently has 359 Year 3 to 12 students at its six campuses, including Brisbane, Bundaberg, Maryborough, Nambour, Toowoomba and Warwick, which is only primary.

Its website states: "The School is conducted in accordance with the beliefs and teachings of the Brethren and the Directors are committed to ensuring that the Ethos, Values and Guiding Principles are enshrined in all aspects of school life".

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

America's Socialist School Teachers

By Warner Todd Huston

I am beginning to feel that there is no hope for many of our school teachers. They’ve become so infused with leftism that any semblance of Americanism is beyond their grasp. Even history is viewed from within a socialist prism as a recent editorial from a teacher from Pennsylvania proves.

In his editorial, teacher Robert J. Fisher of Upper Saucon Township sought to debunk what he called the “extreme right-wing elements” of today’s America. He did this by claiming that nearly every conflict in our history is some sort of example of Marxist class warfare.

For teacher Fisher, all of American history is one giant example of Marxist principles proven right. It doesn’t matter that the ideas of class as Marx described them really didn’t exist during all of American history, of course.

Fisher claims that “primitive Native Americans” and “subsistent frontiersmen from the Piedmont” were all engaged in class warfare with the “wealthier urban merchants and plantation owners.”

He goes on to claim that the Regulators in 1771 North Carolina, Shay’s rebellion (1787), and the earlier Bacon’s rebellion (1675) were all “class warfare.”

Then he says that the “powerful federal government” that Washington and his compatriots created was an attempt to “deal more effectively with such class-based rebellions.” His proof? The 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.

Fisher bounced to the Jacksonian era, saying that President Andrew Jackson’s goal was “reform” America to allow “the common man” to become vested in the system then touted the Civil War as the biggest “class struggle” of them all.

And who else was a hero? Of course it was the rise of the labor union coupled with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies. These, he claims “helped create a vibrant middle class.”

All of this is skewed nonsense. The history of the United States cannot be so simplistically distilled as one of mere class warfare and it’s sad that this person who has been allowed to influence the minds of our children is so blinded by his Marxist theology that this is all he can see.

In fact, in nearly every case Fisher cites the Americans involved were not trying to tear down another class in order to “equalize” society. They did not consider themselves class warriors but people that aimed to advance to a better life themselves.

This is 100 percent opposite of Fisher’s Marxist theology. Marxism wants to tear down society and “the evil rich” and replace it all with an authoritarian, top-down, oppressive central government that allows no one to better themselves. This is as far from American history as can be.

And that whole business that the labor movement created some sort of heaven on earth? Hardly. In fact, the labor unions held America back with the costs and limits on innovation they imposed. It wasn’t unions that brought America that middle class, it was far more the fact that the USA was the one world power untouched physically by the ravages of WWII leaving us in the perfect position to rebuild the world and reap the untold benefits from that lucky stroke. That combined with our American capitalist system, our Yankee work ethic, and our American culture — the very one Fisher disparages as a series of class wars — that allowed us to take advantage of that post world war atmosphere.

But Fisher has inculcated his appreciation of Marxism from his years of indoctrination in our system of higher learning and unfortunately he’s teaching this garbage to our children.

Sharply declining enrollment in half the nation's largest public school districts spells bad news for the union-dominated monopoly of government-run public schools.

School districts in longtime economically stagnant cities like Detroit and Cleveland hemorrhaged the most students, losing 32.1 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. However, economic stagnation is but one of many reasons for declining student enrollment; factors that also include the collapse of the housing market, declining birthrates, migration from the cities, and increased school violence.

In that latter case, for example, Philadelphia, which saw a 10.2 percent drop in enrollment, reported that over the past five years in Philadelphia's 268 public schools, 4,000 students, teachers, or other staff members were "beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes."

In Chicago Public Schools, twenty-four students were fatally shot during the 2011-12 school year, with the overall shooting toll at 319, the highest in four years and a nearly 22 percent increase from the previous school year.

Yet, for some school districts, the most compelling reason for student flight was increased competition from charter and private schools. That conclusion was drawn by Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), which saw the third largest student decline of 11.1 percent.

MPS assigned its troubles to Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, a school voucher program for poor and middle-income students that has allowed more than 23,000 students to enroll in private schools in and around Milwaukee.

If MPS is disturbed by this trend, the American public at large surely does not share the district's unease. "We have record-low confidence in our public schools," observed Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento. Indeed, Gallup's annual "Confidence in American Institutions" poll, conducted just last month, revealed that just 29 percent of Americans have confidence in American public schools. This trend is undoubtedly bolstered by the fact that decades of record amounts of money being fed into public school systems have only managed to produce mediocre-to-poor academic results.

Specifically, despite increasing real spending per student on public K-12 education by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years, academic achievement standards, such as reading proficiency and graduation rates, have only marginally improved.

Those meager results have come despite American public school districts nationwide now spending $604.9 billion a year, with an average of $10,499 being spent per student and a pupil/teacher ratio of 15.4, compared to 1970 when the per-pupil expenditures were $4,060 and the pupil/teacher ratio was 22.3.

Yet, in many cities where spending per student exceeds $10,000 per year, graduation rates are horrifyingly well below the national average of 74 percent, such as in Detroit, which spends $11,100 per year, per student, but only 25 percent of its students graduate.

Sadly, that seems like a bargain when compared to the District of Columbia, whose public schools spend nearly $30,000 per pupil yet in return receive a student graduation rate of 60 percent and a student body that has some of the nation's lowest math and reading scores.

Still, it should be noted that many factors can determine academic performance; in particular, the type of family a child comes from, including those families where an ethos of education, discipline, hard work and other such values are regularly instilled.

However, public school advocates, in particular those in teachers unions, have long insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that spending is the best predictor of educational performance. Of course, this is not unrelated to the fact that an ever increasing amount of the funding winds up in the pocketbooks of teachers and administrators.

For starters, the average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010-11 was $56,069, but an analysis done by the Heritage Foundation found the typical public school teacher makes about $1.52 for every dollar made by a private-sector employee with similar skills.

Yet, for cash-strapped state and local governments plagued by a harsh recession, dwindling property taxes and gaping budget deficits, teacher unions and their allies in the Democratic Party have vigorously fought any reform efforts offered to rein in public employee benefit plans, however modest they may be.

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, for example, was pilloried by the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, for having the temerity to ask teachers to accept a pay freeze and increase their contribution to their healthcare plans from 0 percent to 1.5 percent.

In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker staved off a recall effort for asking public-sector employees (including teachers) to increase their contribution to their pension plans from 0 percent to 5.8 percent and pay 12 percent of their health care benefits.

In Chicago, where student reading proficiency is just 15 percent, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has threatened to strike if not given a 30 percent pay raise in exchange for extending the school year an extra ten days, even though that demand would reportedly force property taxes up 150 percent and require classrooms of 55 students.

Yet, while teachers have fought vigorously to protect their monetary benefits, they have also railed against calls to eliminate teacher tenure, have teachers measured against student performance, or provide parents an alternative choice of schools in which to educate their children.

Teachers are treated like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night: British Head teacher's fury as he is attacked by father who claimed his son was being BULLIED

A headmaster today attacked the culture of parents treating teachers like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night' after he was beaten up a father angry his son was being bullied at school.

Kieran Heakin, 60, was grabbed around the throat after being confronted in his study by the father who had gone to the school to claim his son was being bullied by fellow pupils.

As another teacher tried to intervene, the father also tried to 'knee' and headbutt Mr Heakin, shouting: 'Now I am really going to hurt you'

Mr Heakin, headmaster of St John the Baptist Roman Catholic school in Burnley, Lancashire, was left sore and bruised after the distressing incident and the father, 45, was subsequently arrested.

The head teacher hit out at the lack of respect shown to teachers by parents after the unnamed father who attacked him escaped jail after he was found guilty of assault. He said: 'We are just like NHS staff on a Saturday night where people come into a hospital accident and emergency department and do not have any respect for those people who are trying to help.

'Teaching today is very different to what it used to be like. You have to be really on top of your game and each day you just do not know what is going to happen that day and it could be that a trivial incident turns into a major incident.

'Parents are going through hard times to and there are a lot more broken families and children today can sometimes suffer and these days are brought up having their tea in front of the TV.

'I have forgiven this person but you do get the small minority of parents who have no respect for anybody.

'Other teachers and heads can get depressed about it and when speaking to fellow head teachers I have found that they can get very irate and not want to carry on with the profession.

'But I see it as a character building experience and life is full of experiences.'

The attack occurred last November after father - who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child - stormed into the school to talk about taking his son out of classes. He blocked the door of the study to prevent Mr Heakin from leaving his office and then assaulted him. Mr Heakin added: 'I had visions of him beating me up and finishing me off. I did fear for my life.

'He then started to strangle me as I tried banging. I managed to get free but then he punched me twice in the arms and in my ribs. He was a well-built man and so the blows were hard. 'Then he came right up so that his nose was touching mine and said ‘now I am really going to hurt you’ and kneed me twice in the groin area.

'It was a savage attack. I was concerned for my own safety so I grabbed him by both wrists and held him very strongly for about two minutes while we got help.'

The dad was found guilty of two counts of assault at Burnley magistrates' court yesterday and was given 16 weeks in prison, suspended for a year, with 12 months' supervision and a 12-week 7pm to 7am curfew. He was also ordered to pay £100 compensation and £200 costs.

Sentencing, the magistrates told the father: 'Head teachers and all teachers deserve the protection of the courts to be able to carry out their jobs, in often very difficult circumstances.'

I am beginning to feel that there is no hope for many of our school teachers. They’ve become so infused with leftism that any semblance of Americanism is beyond their grasp. Even history is viewed from within a socialist prism as a recent editorial from a teacher from Pennsylvania proves.

In his editorial, teacher Robert J. Fisher of Upper Saucon Township sought to debunk what he called the “extreme right-wing elements” of today’s America. He did this by claiming that nearly every conflict in our history is some sort of example of Marxist class warfare.

For teacher Fisher, all of American history is one giant example of Marxist principles proven right. It doesn’t matter that the ideas of class as Marx described them really didn’t exist during all of American history, of course.

Fisher claims that “primitive Native Americans” and “subsistent frontiersmen from the Piedmont” were all engaged in class warfare with the “wealthier urban merchants and plantation owners.”

He goes on to claim that the Regulators in 1771 North Carolina, Shay’s rebellion (1787), and the earlier Bacon’s rebellion (1675) were all “class warfare.”

Then he says that the “powerful federal government” that Washington and his compatriots created was an attempt to “deal more effectively with such class-based rebellions.” His proof? The 1791 Whiskey Rebellion.

Fisher bounced to the Jacksonian era, saying that President Andrew Jackson’s goal was “reform” America to allow “the common man” to become vested in the system then touted the Civil War as the biggest “class struggle” of them all.

And who else was a hero? Of course it was the rise of the labor union coupled with Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies. These, he claims “helped create a vibrant middle class.”

All of this is skewed nonsense. The history of the United States cannot be so simplistically distilled as one of mere class warfare and it’s sad that this person who has been allowed to influence the minds of our children is so blinded by his Marxist theology that this is all he can see.

In fact, in nearly every case Fisher cites the Americans involved were not trying to tear down another class in order to “equalize” society. They did not consider themselves class warriors but people that aimed to advance to a better life themselves.

This is 100 percent opposite of Fisher’s Marxist theology. Marxism wants to tear down society and “the evil rich” and replace it all with an authoritarian, top-down, oppressive central government that allows no one to better themselves. This is as far from American history as can be.

And that whole business that the labor movement created some sort of heaven on earth? Hardly. In fact, the labor unions held America back with the costs and limits on innovation they imposed. It wasn’t unions that brought America that middle class, it was far more the fact that the USA was the one world power untouched physically by the ravages of WWII leaving us in the perfect position to rebuild the world and reap the untold benefits from that lucky stroke. That combined with our American capitalist system, our Yankee work ethic, and our American culture — the very one Fisher disparages as a series of class wars — that allowed us to take advantage of that post world war atmosphere.

But Fisher has inculcated his appreciation of Marxism from his years of indoctrination in our system of higher learning and unfortunately he’s teaching this garbage to our children.

Sharply declining enrollment in half the nation's largest public school districts spells bad news for the union-dominated monopoly of government-run public schools.

School districts in longtime economically stagnant cities like Detroit and Cleveland hemorrhaged the most students, losing 32.1 percent and 17.7 percent, respectively. However, economic stagnation is but one of many reasons for declining student enrollment; factors that also include the collapse of the housing market, declining birthrates, migration from the cities, and increased school violence.

In that latter case, for example, Philadelphia, which saw a 10.2 percent drop in enrollment, reported that over the past five years in Philadelphia's 268 public schools, 4,000 students, teachers, or other staff members were "beaten, robbed, sexually assaulted, or victims of other violent crimes."

In Chicago Public Schools, twenty-four students were fatally shot during the 2011-12 school year, with the overall shooting toll at 319, the highest in four years and a nearly 22 percent increase from the previous school year.

Yet, for some school districts, the most compelling reason for student flight was increased competition from charter and private schools. That conclusion was drawn by Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), which saw the third largest student decline of 11.1 percent.

MPS assigned its troubles to Milwaukee's Parental Choice Program, a school voucher program for poor and middle-income students that has allowed more than 23,000 students to enroll in private schools in and around Milwaukee.

If MPS is disturbed by this trend, the American public at large surely does not share the district's unease. "We have record-low confidence in our public schools," observed Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento. Indeed, Gallup's annual "Confidence in American Institutions" poll, conducted just last month, revealed that just 29 percent of Americans have confidence in American public schools. This trend is undoubtedly bolstered by the fact that decades of record amounts of money being fed into public school systems have only managed to produce mediocre-to-poor academic results.

Specifically, despite increasing real spending per student on public K-12 education by 23.5 percent over the past decade and by 49 percent over the past 20 years, academic achievement standards, such as reading proficiency and graduation rates, have only marginally improved.

Those meager results have come despite American public school districts nationwide now spending $604.9 billion a year, with an average of $10,499 being spent per student and a pupil/teacher ratio of 15.4, compared to 1970 when the per-pupil expenditures were $4,060 and the pupil/teacher ratio was 22.3.

Yet, in many cities where spending per student exceeds $10,000 per year, graduation rates are horrifyingly well below the national average of 74 percent, such as in Detroit, which spends $11,100 per year, per student, but only 25 percent of its students graduate.

Sadly, that seems like a bargain when compared to the District of Columbia, whose public schools spend nearly $30,000 per pupil yet in return receive a student graduation rate of 60 percent and a student body that has some of the nation's lowest math and reading scores.

Still, it should be noted that many factors can determine academic performance; in particular, the type of family a child comes from, including those families where an ethos of education, discipline, hard work and other such values are regularly instilled.

However, public school advocates, in particular those in teachers unions, have long insisted, despite evidence to the contrary, that spending is the best predictor of educational performance. Of course, this is not unrelated to the fact that an ever increasing amount of the funding winds up in the pocketbooks of teachers and administrators.

For starters, the average salary for full-time public school teachers in 2010-11 was $56,069, but an analysis done by the Heritage Foundation found the typical public school teacher makes about $1.52 for every dollar made by a private-sector employee with similar skills.

Yet, for cash-strapped state and local governments plagued by a harsh recession, dwindling property taxes and gaping budget deficits, teacher unions and their allies in the Democratic Party have vigorously fought any reform efforts offered to rein in public employee benefit plans, however modest they may be.

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, for example, was pilloried by the New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, for having the temerity to ask teachers to accept a pay freeze and increase their contribution to their healthcare plans from 0 percent to 1.5 percent.

In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker staved off a recall effort for asking public-sector employees (including teachers) to increase their contribution to their pension plans from 0 percent to 5.8 percent and pay 12 percent of their health care benefits.

In Chicago, where student reading proficiency is just 15 percent, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has threatened to strike if not given a 30 percent pay raise in exchange for extending the school year an extra ten days, even though that demand would reportedly force property taxes up 150 percent and require classrooms of 55 students.

Yet, while teachers have fought vigorously to protect their monetary benefits, they have also railed against calls to eliminate teacher tenure, have teachers measured against student performance, or provide parents an alternative choice of schools in which to educate their children.

Teachers are treated like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night: British Head teacher's fury as he is attacked by father who claimed his son was being BULLIED

A headmaster today attacked the culture of parents treating teachers like 'NHS staff on a Saturday night' after he was beaten up a father angry his son was being bullied at school.

Kieran Heakin, 60, was grabbed around the throat after being confronted in his study by the father who had gone to the school to claim his son was being bullied by fellow pupils.

As another teacher tried to intervene, the father also tried to 'knee' and headbutt Mr Heakin, shouting: 'Now I am really going to hurt you'

Mr Heakin, headmaster of St John the Baptist Roman Catholic school in Burnley, Lancashire, was left sore and bruised after the distressing incident and the father, 45, was subsequently arrested.

The head teacher hit out at the lack of respect shown to teachers by parents after the unnamed father who attacked him escaped jail after he was found guilty of assault. He said: 'We are just like NHS staff on a Saturday night where people come into a hospital accident and emergency department and do not have any respect for those people who are trying to help.

'Teaching today is very different to what it used to be like. You have to be really on top of your game and each day you just do not know what is going to happen that day and it could be that a trivial incident turns into a major incident.

'Parents are going through hard times to and there are a lot more broken families and children today can sometimes suffer and these days are brought up having their tea in front of the TV.

'I have forgiven this person but you do get the small minority of parents who have no respect for anybody.

'Other teachers and heads can get depressed about it and when speaking to fellow head teachers I have found that they can get very irate and not want to carry on with the profession.

'But I see it as a character building experience and life is full of experiences.'

The attack occurred last November after father - who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child - stormed into the school to talk about taking his son out of classes. He blocked the door of the study to prevent Mr Heakin from leaving his office and then assaulted him. Mr Heakin added: 'I had visions of him beating me up and finishing me off. I did fear for my life.

'He then started to strangle me as I tried banging. I managed to get free but then he punched me twice in the arms and in my ribs. He was a well-built man and so the blows were hard. 'Then he came right up so that his nose was touching mine and said ‘now I am really going to hurt you’ and kneed me twice in the groin area.

'It was a savage attack. I was concerned for my own safety so I grabbed him by both wrists and held him very strongly for about two minutes while we got help.'

The dad was found guilty of two counts of assault at Burnley magistrates' court yesterday and was given 16 weeks in prison, suspended for a year, with 12 months' supervision and a 12-week 7pm to 7am curfew. He was also ordered to pay £100 compensation and £200 costs.

Sentencing, the magistrates told the father: 'Head teachers and all teachers deserve the protection of the courts to be able to carry out their jobs, in often very difficult circumstances.'

Monday, July 30, 2012

Louisiana Teachers Union Threatens Schools

Headline - 7/27/12

(Baton Rouge, Louisiana) Posted Friday:

The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for school choice—today condemned the actions of the Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE), after counsel for the teachers union yesterday sent threatening letters to schools participating in Louisiana’s statewide voucher program, urging them to drop out of the program or face a lawsuit from the union.

The letter comes despite a judge’s ruling two weeks ago that dismissed a union attempt to get an injunction stopping the program.

In the letter, which was faxed to participating voucher schools yesterday evening, a law firm retained by the LAE union threatens to initiate litigation against individual schools if they do not pledge—in writing—by 4 p.m. local time tomorrow to cease participation in the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence (SSEE) program.

Kevin P. Chavous, a senior advisor to the Federation, denounced the bullying tactics as a remarkably cruel attempt to block children from attending the schools their parents have chosen for them.

Radical unschoolers seem to have this reputation of being really free-wheeling, anything-goes-to-the-point-of-unparenting folk, and I really don’t think that’s true of anyone, especially the Christian radical unschoolers. Everyone has their “thing” and even the most liberal atheistic RUS will have what they will and will not accept when it comes to their children.

To not have personal standards or requirements of our children is to tip over into the realm of neglect, and I think that folks who have made the active choice to unschool, no matter how wacky their ideas may seem, are far from neglectful or uninterested in their children. They may make decisions that in the end are possibly unwise and at worst irresponsible, but that is not the same as just not caring about your kid – who they are, how they feel, and what they do.

Even in parenting without limits and boundaries, there is still the fact that we are feeding into our children our own thoughts, feelings, experiences, wisdom, and knowledge. We are still under the command to raise up disciples. The difference comes in the manner in which we do that discipling.

Christian Radical Unschooling

To a Christian radical unschooler, our bottom line is that our children, regardless of their age, size, gender, birth order, giftings, issues, etc, are our fellow human beings and should be treated with the exact same dignity, respect, and consideration as any of the other seven billion people on this planet. The only difference between our children and the dude down the street is that we have been given special spiritual and physical responsibility for them as their coverings.

So what it really boils down to is: “How do you disciple your neighbors – when you are directly responsible for them and they live in your home?”

Different people have different ideas about what constitutes discipling: from a strict, methodical, punitive discipline approach, all the way to just “hoping they’ll make the right decision” without ever once giving any example or instruction. For ME, I look to Christ and His apostles as my example for discipling others, including my children. Jesus led by example, and asked folks to follow Him, but did not coerce or browbeat anyone into making that choice.

My children follow me. They mimic me. They mirror every word I say and attitude I exhibit. They go where I go and breathe in the spiritual air I breathe out. *IF* I am doing a good job in following and mirroring Christ, then it eventually will come to a point where their faith must be their own, and their OWN hearts must be either for or against God. They will no longer be mirroring, but walking on their own.

The Freedom to Choose

One day, they will make that choice for themselves, whether to walk the way Jesus walks, or to walk the path that leads to destruction. I believe that God is not interested in righteous pagans. It is not my desire to have children who “look good on paper” but are really just whitewashed tombs. So I would much rather have raised a child who can say, “I don’t believe,” and have the intellectual honesty to tell me as much, than one who professes faith but is a complete hypocrite inside.

Setting limits and boundaries about what is acceptable behavior doesn’t teach the heart and mind, nor does it form character. Those things are “inherited” through following another’s example and making it one’s own. By demanding certain rules be followed, we miss the opportunity to allow our children to naturally grow from mimicry, to making choices for themselves.

When we attempt to exert our will over another to create a limit or boundary to their behavior, whether our child, or someone else, we are doing something that God Himself does not even do. We are bound by natural laws – we cannot simply flap our arms and fly away for example – but our behavior is governed by our own internal controls. God does not MAKE us do anything. He gives us commands, and requests we follow them, but it is up to us to choose whether or not we will do it. When we find it difficult, He gives us His Spirit and power to accomplish those things.

That is, I believe, the key to parenting without limits. We invite our children to follow us, which they do as a natural extension of being our children. When they are young, and find something harder than others, we assist them to make the choices we feel are best (i.e. taking them to church with us, removing them from dangerous situations, etc). As they mature, and no longer need our assistance, they begin to own their behavior for themselves; forming their own relationship with Christ.

In the end, we only have control over the behavior of ONE person on this planet – our own. Everyone else, we are merely coaxing along to follow our example. We should work to make it a good one, because our children are apt pupils. They WILL learn what we teach them – whether we realize we included the lesson or not.

Don't blame Britain's universities for their lack of state-school students

Vince Cable's efforts to force universities to admit more working-class students are ridiculous, given what the Government has done to slow social mobility, says Archie Cornish

Vince Cable’s calls for elite universities to admit a greater proportion of working-class students or face financial penalties are a little empty. As of September, proposals state, "elite" universities will face penalties of up to £500,000 if they do not admit an externally set quota of state school students.

Cable is casting the Russell Group universities in the role many feel the banks occupy: rogue, self-interested institutions which burn and pillage society and must be slapped on the wrist, or better handcuffed. It is a piece of political evasiveness as cheap as David Cameron’s cack-handed (and inaccurate) observation last year that Oxford had only admitted one black student. The government’s ministers have always struggled to distance themselves from the institutions which propelled them into power, but are usually met with little more than impatience: Oxford and Imperial College London have reacted to the Business Secretary’s remarks by telling him to mind his own Business.

This government has severely damaged access for Britain’s universities. It introduced the infamous £9,000 maximum fees, which most of the big names are set to charge, and which were met with sometimes obnoxious (that flag-swinging) but undoubtedly serious protests. The government has always argued that it had to hike the fees given the economic climate, and while this may be true, there can be no excusing its atrocious presentation of the policy: the £9k bombshell was interpreted as a standard (rather than maximum) fee, and the its architects failed to emphasise the waivers and delays available for poorer students. When this year’s applications to UCAS were predicted to fall by 10 per cent in January, the sound of two and two being put together could .

Given how much the Coalition government has done to compromise poorer students' access to top universities, it is ridiculous for Cable to portray them as obstacles in the path of reforms.

That's not to say that reforms aren't needed. Oxford, Cambridge and the other Russell Group universities have an unhealthy stranglehold on power and influence in Britain. More needs to be done to ensure that applicants from a wider range of schools get into top universities, so that the future elite is drawn from more than private schools and some exceptionally good state schools.

Oxford itself has decided to target prospective applicants not by school but by income, seeking out those whose families earn less than £16,000 a year, and who traditionally will not go to university. This makes greater social sense - but, unfortunately, poorer headlines. Michael Moritz’s donation of £75m, on the other hand, made a big splash. The welcome reception of the millionaire’s gift, which by next year will already assist 100 students, suggests that in the face of unrelenting funding cuts, universities must ramp up their strategies for targeting alumni for support.

True change in education needs more than money, though, just as real social mobility relies on more than quotas and figure-fixing. The director of the Sutton Trust, which last year rated Cambridge’s Oxbridge-feeder Hill’s Road Sixth Form College as an "elite institution", explained the school’s success in terms of the high percentage of children whose parents are Cambridge dons. If this shows anything, it is that there is more to school success than the private-state dichotomy Cable relies on.

In contrast, Cable’s remarks are just not subtle enough. The top universities really are not evil opponents of change, and the government’s attempts to fashion themselves as crusaders for social mobility are transparent and hypocritical. Like so many proposed actions on universities, it is a surface solution to a deep, complex problem.

I agree with this. I was a successful High School teacher despite having not one minute of teacher training

Thousands of state schools will be allowed to hire unqualified staff to teach for the first time because ministers believe the best teachers are “born, not made”.

Under existing rules, all mainstream state schools have had to ensure their teachers held “qualified teacher status” (QTS) after completing officially recognised training.

However, the Department for Education announced that academies will be given the same freedom that private schools have to hire anyone they think would succeed in the classroom.

Headteachers of academies will be able to employ professional scientists, engineers and musicians, or experienced staff from overseas, who could make excellent teachers but do not have QTS, the government said.

Under new contracts announced yesterday, all schools that become academies from November will automatically be given the new freedom to hire staff without QTS.

Michael Gove, the education secretary, will also allow all 1,957 existing academies, including around half of state secondary schools, to apply for the same power.

Mr Gove was unavailable for comment on his reforms, which are expected to be resisted by teachers’ unions.

The education secretary has already clashed with the two biggest teaching unions, the NASUWT and the NUT, over a series of changes that they say amount to an attack on teachers’ pay and working conditions.

A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “Independent schools and Free Schools can already hire brilliant people who have not got QTS.

“We are extending this flexibility to all academies so more schools can hire great linguists, computer scientists, engineers and other specialists who have not worked in state schools before.”

The spokesman said the “vast majority” of teachers were likely to continue to have formal teaching qualifications, and that no existing teacher’s contract will be affected.

But the extra “flexibility” should help schools improve more quickly. Officials said schools would continue to be held accountable for the quality of teaching through Ofsted inspection and league tables.

Richard Cairns, headmaster of Brighton College, a leading independent school, said an unqualified teacher who trains on the job is often better than someone with a postgraduate certificate in education.

“I strongly believe that teachers are born not made and I will actively seek out teachers from all walks of life who have the potential to inspire children," he said. “We have 39 teachers without formal teaching qualifications, including me.”

However, Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, representing secondary heads, urged academies to ignore the reforms.

“Teaching is a skill, and the idea of employing individuals who have not been given the tools to do a professional job flies in the face of the coalition government's aspiration of creating a high status profession,” he said.

“Of course subject knowledge makes a difference but it is no replacement for professional training.”

“This policy change is a retrograde step which ASCL would advise academies to ignore.”

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, accused the government of a “dereliction of duty.”

“All children deserve to be taught by qualified teachers,” she argued.

“Parents and teachers will see this as a cost-cutting measure that will cause irreparable damage to children's education. Schools need a properly resourced team of qualified teachers and support staff, not lower investment dressed up as ‘freedoms’.”

Stephen Twigg MP, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, said: "While we welcome more professionals coming into teaching there need to be clear safeguards and ensure there is adequate training capacity in schools. If there are issues with teacher training and development, they should be addressed head on, not avoided.

"These kind of announcements should be presented to Parliament, not sneaked out hours before the Olympics opening ceremony."

Sunday, July 29, 2012

A College Reinvents Teacher Education

Under pressure, Hillsdale improves its already excellent program and shows that accreditation doesn’t matter if you’re good

In 2007, Michigan’s Department of Education changed its policy to require national accreditation for all teacher certification programs in the state. Hillsdale’s program had been certified by the state for decades, but administrators concluded that it would be wasteful to dedicate precious resources to an accreditation process that lacked both value and credibility.

Instead of closing the school’s Education Department, Hillsdale’s administration recognized that teacher certification is not the same as teacher education. The college could still produce smart, dedicated teachers for America’s classrooms, even if the students wouldn’t have an immediate path to certification. Hillsdale decided to continue its program and invite schools unrestricted by the burden of certification requirements to hire its graduates.

The professors in the Education Department embraced this new freedom and began to think about what teacher education could be without the ideological straightjacket (i.e., “standards”) from the state. We began our revision by identifying what kind of preparation was truly important for future teachers.

First, we concluded that teachers need a broad liberal arts education. Hillsdale is a liberal arts college and its education faculty takes this identity seriously. We believe that it’s not enough for a teacher to be a specialist in one subject area or to be a pedagogical technician. The best teachers are liberally educated and know how numerous subjects fit together to form a coherent picture of reality. Such an image can only develop if future teachers have a rigorous core curriculum that addresses the sciences, language, history, art, etc.

Second, we decided that future teachers need to know the subjects they will teach very well. Deep understanding of a subject can only develop from extensive study in the subject. Unlike some institutions that offer a major in Education, Hillsdale requires all students to complete a major in an academic discipline. This means that those students who wish to pursue a career in teaching—even those who will teach at the elementary level—will have an undergraduate degree in an academic field. Coupled with Hillsdale’s strong core curriculum, we believe the in-depth study associated with an academic major will prepare the future teacher to model and provide a quality education for K-12 students.

Third, we determined that the most important aspects of pedagogy—the function and work of a teacher—are best learned in a real classroom with real students under the tutelage of a master teacher. This means that future teachers are best prepared for their careers by observing and working with real classroom teachers.

In light of those principles, we realized that many of our existing courses had been developed only to meet the state’s onerous standards, which had tightly controlled what was taught in teacher education courses. With those requirements no longer binding, we were free to keep what was useful, eliminate that which was not, and create new courses to address whatever was being overlooked.

We decided to eliminate methods classes and courses in educational psychology and technology. Because the state had such a heavy hand in dictating these classes (enforcing their “standards”), much of the content was irrelevant or antithetical to the mission of both the college and the department. We believe that our students’ undergraduate experience will be much richer if they take more courses in their major or work with a teacher in a real classroom than if they have to slog through low-information courses.

We revised a number of existing courses (e.g., Philosophy of Education, Explicit Phonics Reading Instruction, and Children’s Literature) that addressed important ideas and topics that were consistent with the mission of the College. In an effort to match the rigor of courses in other departments across the campus, education professors made those courses much more content-driven and more demanding in terms of reading, discussion, and writing.

The Education Department also recognized a need for a new course in English grammar and, with consultation from the college’s English Department, designed a comprehensive course in English grammar for future teachers. Language is the most important tool of the teacher’s trade. As Richard Mitchell (“the Underground Grammarian”) once said, “’Good grammar’…is the Law by which meaning is found and made.”

Yet as David Mulroy showed in his book The War Against Grammar (2003), most educators do not know how the English language works. He concluded, “Unfortunately, few…teachers now have the necessary educational background to teach grammar or to integrate it within their lesson plans. There is only one way for them to obtain this knowledge: it has to be taught explicitly in the college curriculum.” At Hillsdale, we recognize that language is the vehicle for thinking, learning, and teaching and the Education Department decided to make sure that the future teachers who graduate from our college have a solid understanding of how the English language works.

Finally, we partnered with a well-respected private school in the community to develop a new teacher apprenticeship program. This semester-long internship requires college students to work closely with experienced classroom educators to learn the craft of teaching.

As the semester moves along, the apprentices gradually increase their responsibility—from observation to lead teaching—as the master teachers deem appropriate. We concluded that school personnel (i.e., administrators and teachers) were in a much better position to make decisions about the apprentices’ progress and level of responsibility, and therefore we shifted most of the day-to-day responsibilities of the apprenticeship to the school.

The standard teacher preparation program requires the student to dedicate an entire semester (and sometimes two semesters) exclusively to the student-teaching experience, but Hillsdale offers both part-time and full-time placements depending on how much time students have in their schedules. Most of our students choose a part-time (about 10 hours a week) apprenticeship so that they can continue to take a full load of classes.

Unlike most teacher education programs, which see themselves as gatekeepers to the teaching profession, Hillsdale sees itself as offering advice and supplementary services for students who want to pursue teaching. Our education faculty is available to advise students on what opportunities are available for students who want to teach.

Fully informed about the wide variety of options, Hillsdale students are free to choose which opportunities—including education courses—they think they will need if they want to teach. Some of our graduates find teaching positions at private and charter schools without having a single education course on their transcript, although we have heard from graduates (and their employers) that the revised curriculum is worth the time and effort.

Many private or charter schools have hired our smart, dedicated, well-prepared graduates. Leaders from these schools have often found the standard ed school certification to be a poor indicator of teacher quality. Because they are free to hire the most talented applicants available, regardless of certification status, they have flocked to Hillsdale for teacher candidates.

Since 2009, Hillsdale College has hosted a job fair for schools that are interested in hiring Hillsdale graduates. In 2012, the job fair drew representatives from 30 schools in states as far away as Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and North Carolina.

The impact of the changes we have made has been very encouraging, both to the department and the college as a whole. As the department changed its focus and increased the academic rigor of its coursework, we have seen more academically gifted students taking education classes and pursuing careers in teaching. No longer are education classes viewed as trivial “hoops” through which future teachers must jump. Students now see these courses—especially the teacher apprenticeship—as pivotal to their future success.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but I think something remarkable occurred at UCLA last week. By a vote of 56%-44%—almost double the margin of Scott Walker’s recent recall-election victory—the UCLA faculty rejected a proposed “Community and Conflict in the Modern World” general-education requirement.

The proposal would have required each UCLA student to take a class that examines “community and conflict.” Although the proposal did not precisely define “community and conflict,” it listed a set of sample courses that would satisfy the requirement. Approximately half of those courses were taught by one of the “studies” departments—e.g. African American Studies, Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Labor and Workplace Studies, American Indian Studies, etc. Almost all of the remaining half would naturally fit in one of the “studies” departments.

I was shocked by the vote. I’d estimate that out of approximately 4,000 faculty members at UCLA, only about 40 have right-of-center political views. And of those 40, approximately three-quarters aren’t true conservatives—instead they’re libertarians or right-leaning moderates. I know of only five UCLA professors who at least occasionally call themselves conservative, consistently vote for Republicans, and are willing to admit that publicly.

Given the above facts and the 56-44 vote, it necessarily follows that a large fraction of liberal professors voted against the “community and conflict” requirement.

The same attitudes were true of UCLA students. Based on some informal polls I’ve conducted, approximately 80% of UCLA students preferred Obama over McCain in the last presidential election. Despite the overwhelmingly liberal ideology among UCLA students, only 45% said that they were disappointed that the proposal failed. (Another 6% said that UCLA needs a diversity-related requirement but opposed the current proposal. This poll is ongoing – I am using numbers that the web site listed at approximately 8:00am on June 10.)

Although I was shocked by the results, one of my liberal friends lectured me why I shouldn’t have been so surprised. “I know you think UCLA is just a bunch of knee-jerk leftists,” he explained. “But a lot of those leftists are actually academic conservatives.” By the latter phrase he meant people who value high standards and rigor in teaching and research.

While few people will say it, nearly everyone on college campuses understands that the “studies” classes are not very rigorous; nor do they have high intellectual standards.

If, however, you say something like that on a university campus, within seconds you’ll usually hear a reply such as, “No, no academic discipline is any more rigorous than any other. It’s just that different disciplines require different talents.”

Notwithstanding how often you hear such statements, no one in the history of mankind has ever said, “Darn, I made a D in Chicano studies. I guess now I’ll have to major in chemistry.” In contrast, lots of people have said the opposite. Academic conservatives—even those who are leftwing politically—understand that fact.

My liberal friend made another claim: The same academic conservatives, although they do not think very highly of the “studies” departments, do not want to admit that fact publicly. They understand the mob-like responses they will have to face, including being called a racist, if they do that. Indeed my liberal friend speculated that if the “community and conflict” proposal had been decided by an open ballot instead of a secret one, then the proposal would have passed almost unanimously.

Thus, the current situation on college campuses is similar to the last several years of the Soviet Union. Nearly everyone can see that the system is faulty. But no one will dare to say that publicly.

Last week UCLA revealed a crack in the wall of campus political correctness. Maybe someday the academic equivalent of a Ronald Reagan will demand that we tear down the entire wall.

Leading universities defy government calls to take more students from state comprehensives.

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has told elite universities to increase the number of undergraduates they admit from working class backgrounds or face financial penalties.

The policy prompted fears that highly academic institutions would reject well-qualified sixth-formers from private schools to meet the government’s agenda of “social meddling”.

However, about half of the most respected academic institutions in the country are refusing to use state school intake as a key target for increasing opportunities for deprived students.

Oxford said the state school target would be “misleading” while Imperial College London suggested that the problem lay with poor results in comprehensives and colleges.

All universities wanting to charge higher tuition fees of more than £6,000 must sign contracts with a government watchdog containing targets to “widen access” to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Under the new regime coming into force in September, universities could face fines of up to £500,000 for failing to meet their targets or be banned from charging fees above £6,000 a year.

Analysis of the contracts that institutions have signed with the Office for Fair Access watchdog suggests that three-quarters of universities intend to charge the maximum £9,000 a year for at least some of their degree courses.

However, half of the research-intensive Russell group universities in England have refused to include specific targets for increasing the number of state school students they admit.

Oxford University said it was “misleading” to treat all state school students as disadvantaged, compared with those who have been privately educated.

“Our goal is to increase access for under-represented groups. We are not convinced that using school type is the best means to that end,” the university said in an introduction to its contract with Offa.

Instead, Oxford will focus on attracting candidates from homes with incomes of less than £16,000 a year, the very poorest in society. Other universities are focusing on attracting applications from neighbourhoods which rarely send students into higher education.

The University of Manchester said targets for increasing students from state schools and colleges was “widely acknowledged” as “the least valid” milestone to use.

“The social composition of top performing state schools has been shown to be extremely skewed towards more affluent sections of society,” the university said on Thursday.

Imperial College London said state educated students were “not a disadvantaged group in themselves”. Imperial currently takes 38 per cent of students from independent schools. But this simply reflects “the gap in performance” between A-level students in state and private sixth-forms.

Tim Hands, master of the independent Magdalen College School, Oxford, said the state school targets were the product of "politically inspired social meddling".

A Department for Business, Innovation and Skills spokesman said: “The Government is determined that no-one with the ambition and ability, whatever their background, should come up against barriers to accessing higher education.

“Universities will be investing over £670 million in attracting students from disadvantaged backgrounds by 2016/17, over quarter of their fee income above basic fee levels."

Background

Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.

The only qualification you really need for any job is: "Can you do it?"

Particularly in academe, Leftism is motivated by a feeling of superiority, a feeling that they know best. But how fragile that claim clearly is when they do so much to suppress expression of conservative ideas. Academic Leftists, despite their pretensions, cannot withstand open debate about ideas. In those circumstances, their pretenses are contemptible. I suspect that they are mostly aware of the vulnerability of their arguments but just NEED to feel superior

"The two most important questions in a society are: Who teaches our children? What are they teaching them?" - Plato

Keynes did get some things right. His comment on education seems positively prophetic: "Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.”

"If you are able to compose sentences in Latin you will never write a dud sentence in English." -- Boris Johnson

"Common core" and its Australian equivalent was a good idea that was hijacked by the Left in an effort to make it "Leftist core". That made it "Rejected core"

TERMINOLOGY: The English "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".

The BIGGEST confusion in British terminology, however, surrounds use of the term "public school". Traditionally, a public school was where people who were rich but not rich enough to afford private tutors sent their kids. So a British public school is a fee-paying school. It is what Americans or Australians would call a private school. Brits are however aware of the confusion this causes benighted non-Brits so these days often in the media use "Independent" where once they would have used "public". The term for a taxpayer-supported school in Britain is a State school, but there are several varieties of those. The most common (and deplorable) type of State school is a "Comprehensive"

MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).

There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.

Another true modern parable: I have twin stepdaughters who are both attractive and exceptionally good-natured young women. I adore both of them. One got a university degree and the other was an abject failure at High School. One now works as a routine government clerk and is rather struggling financially. The other is extraordinarily highly paid and has an impressive property portfolio. Guess which one went to university? It was the former.

The above was written a couple of years ago and both women have moved on since then. The advantage to the "uneducated" one persists, however. She is living what many would see as a dream.

The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed

On June 6, 1944, a large number of young men charged ashore at Normandy beaches into a high probability of injury or death. Now, a large number of young people need safe spaces in case they might hear something that they don't like.

Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a First Class Honours degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.

Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor

"Secretary [of Education] Bennett makes, I think, an interesting analogy. He says that if you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, Federal, State, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with." -- Ronald Reagan

I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.

Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts. Nothing else will ever be of service to them ... Stick to Facts, sir!" So spake Mr Gradgrind, Dickens's dismal schoolteacher in Hard Times, published 1854. Mr Gradgrind was undoubtedly too narrow but the opposite extreme -- no facts -- would seem equally bad and is much closer to us than Mr Gradgrind's ideal

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learned much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.

Popper in "Against Big Words": "Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or 'to society') to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly and modestly as he can. The worst thing that intellectuals can do - the cardinal sin - is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so."

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

Comments above from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former teacher at both High School and university level

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here